Monday, August 24, 2009

William Dembski: Curiouser and Curiouser

Characters of the Wild Web: Academic fugitive Billy the DembskID is proving difficult to nail.

William Dembski has given a brief reply (here) in response to reactions to his latest paper. Here is the bulk of Dembski’s reply:

One criticism is that it at best is consistent with theistic evolution but does not support ID. I think this is a mistake. I’ve said for over a decade now that ID is consistent with the most far-flung evolutionary change. The key contention of ID is that design in nature, and in biology in particular, is detectable. Evolutionary informatics, by looking at the information requirements of evolutionary processes, points to information sources beyond evolution and thus, indirectly, to a designer. Theistic evolution, by contrast, accepts the Darwinian view that Darwinian processes generate the information required for biological complexity internally, without any outside source of information. The results by Marks and me are showing that this cannot be the case. The paper just published is only the first installment. It essentially lays out our accounting procedure for measuring the information in evolutionary search. We have two forthcoming papers that flesh out our larger project (available at www.evoinfo.org/publications), showing that attempts to account for the information internally, without an external information source, all founder.

I’m confused to say the least.

As my previous blog post suggests, even atheists like Mark Chu-Carrol and Joe Felsenstein on Panda’s thumb would accept that evolution only works if resourced by the right physical regime. In the sense that this physical regime seems to just one possibility singled out from a huge space of apparent possibilities it thus appears as a precondition of very remote probability. Hence, using Dembski’s measure of information (-log[p]) evolution requires, accordingly, a very high a-priori information content, Without getting into quibbles over Dembski’s use of the term “information” one might wonder just what distinguishes Dembski’s position from these atheists; both accept that (very) special conditions are required to resource evolution. Of course, the real difference is just where the respective parties go from there: The atheists believe that the apparent fortuitousness of the right physics is no argument for God/Intelligence. (I personally don’t think it is right to start accusing atheists of the unforgivable sin if at this point in the argument they want to say “Hold on a minute, this doesn’t necessarily follow”)

However, while the atheists stop and think about that one let me run with William Dembski.

Firstly, another quibble: Is the notion of probability applicable to the “brute” givens of the physical regime? In physical theory such as quantum physics, probability is a quantity defined within the confines of a given system that generates frequency profiles. In contrast the brute givens of the physical regime are meta-features that don’t find context within a system of frequency profiles and so this raises questions about the applicability of probability to the physical regime itself.

But however we settle that quibble, I for one will accept that there is no getting away from it: The apparent logically unwarranted nature of the cosmic set up seems a remarkable brute fact and for theists like myself and William Dembski, this is seen as evidence of providence, so in this sense I can run with William Dembski’s design views. As a tentative evolutionist this makes me, presumably, a theistic evolutionist.

But Dembski pins theistic evolutionists to a straw man: “Theistic evolution, by contrast, accepts the Darwinian view that Darwinian processes generate the information required for biological complexity internally, without any outside source of information.” I just can’t buy that. Even atheists, as we have seen, accept that evolutionary theory doesn’t explain everything, (especially the conditions that resource it) and that it leaves a sort of “informational” loose end, although of course atheists wouldn’t accept that this loose end should be tied up theistically.

Now Prof William, I can’t speak for other Theistic Evolutionists but correct me if I am wrong; I thought that Theistic Evolution was precisely the belief that God creates and sustains the required preconditions that considerably enhance the chances of evolution working. If Christian theistic evolutionists really believe, as you suggest, that evolution is tantamount to an ex-nihilo creative agency and therefore does not require any outside agency why, oh why are they Christian theists rather than Yin Yan or Gnostic dualists?

OK there may be quibbles about your concept of information but my understanding is that Theistic Evolutionists would broadly agree that evolution is providentially supplied with the right resources to work; that is, evolution is no logical necessity and as such needs some far deeper necessity to create and sustain the conditions it requires. If that’s what you mean by Darwinian evolution not creating information I can run with that.

So just where do you stand William? You say “I’ve said for over a decade now that ID is consistent with the most far-flung evolutionary change”. So given that we accept the necessity of “active information” to resource evolution does this mean that you can affirm that evolution is not necessarily inconsistent with ID? Does this mean that one can be an evolutionist AND an ID theorist? Do you have any ID evolutionist friends? And what are your views on YEC theory?

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.